A Biography of Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

By Grant Robinson

Today science still grapples with many of the theories and ideas put forward by Albert Einstein and this is hardly surprising , there is no doubting that he will remain one of history’s greatest theoretical scientists. But there is another great scientist whose work with electricity, almost 100 years ago, may well have profound implications on the world into the 21st century - Nikola Tesla. Born into a traditional Serbian family at midnight on the 9th of July 1856 Nikola Tesla was destined for a life far removed from his humble beginnings in the village of Smiljan, Croatia. With a father who was a Serbian Orthodox priest Tesla could well have fallen into a life in the church but he dreamt a different path for himself, one in engineering. This led him to Austria where he attended the Technical University of Graz and it was here that he first saw the Gramme dynamo and the first seeds of the induction motor were sown. From Graz he moved onto the University of Prague for more formal education and it was there that his obsession with the electric motor grew. It was while he was in Prague that his eccentric side began to emerge as well as the obsession with his senses. On himself Tesla wrote " I am an exceptionally accurate instrument of reception, in other words, a seer. But such a surtax of the brain is fraught with great danger to life." Tesla’s mind was constantly buzzing, so much so, that, before he would eat, he would calculate the cubic dimensions of his meal. For therapy he took to walking through the City Park in Prague and it was here that he sketched a diagram of the first induction motor. His first invention, the telephone repeater, was made while working at his first job in an engineering office in Budapest and it was also here that he made the first substantial steps towards developing the induction motor. A rotating magnetic field formed the basis of his first induction motor plans and a further move toward his ultimate goal of utilizing alternating current. It was in 1882 that Tesla began to work with The Continental Edison Company in Paris and it was during this time that he built the prototype induction motor and began the search for someone to sell it to. At the same time Thomas Edison had been investing large amounts of time and money in developing his own electrical system based on direct current, a system totally incompatible with Tesla’s. When Tesla emigrated to the USA in 1884 he went to work with Edison in New Jersey and quickly found that as inventors they were ‘poles’ apart and their alliance was short. In the New York Times in 1931 Telsa said of Edison "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search." Shortly after his parting with Edison in 1885, Tesla’s name was penciled into the history books when George Westinghouse bought the patent rights to his polyphase system of alternating current dynamos, transformers, and motors. The rest, as they say, is history and today almost every home in the world contains a Tesla ‘memorial’.

Page 2

It is the marriage with Westinghouse that Tesla is most remembered for and it virtually ended the battle between alternating and direct current. Westinghouse put the final nail in the direct current coffin, in 1893 when, at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he used alternating current to power 200,000 light bulbs. Over twenty five million visitors passed through the gates and the Westinghouse exhibition was an overwhelming success and this paved the way for him winning the contract to build the first power plant at Niagara Falls. In 1896 the power plant used a high tension line to carry power 35 kilometres to the town of Buffalo and subsequently transformed the world’s perception the long distance transport of electricity. The period between 1891 and 1899 were historically Tesla’s most productive and over this time he produced the Tesla coil (still used today in radio and television), various types of fluorescent lights, his own version of the steam turbine and countless other innovations. One amazing fact is that at the time of his death in 1943 Tesla was the holder of over 700 patents. It was toward the end of last century that he became increasingly intrigued with the concept of transmitting power without wires and it is the first ten years of the 20th century that, I believe, Tesla’s true genius was realized. It was in early 1899 that Tesla built a laboratory in the mountains outside Colorado Springs where he proceeded to build an enormous Tesla Coil tower and at the same time making what I see to be his most important discovery - terrestrial stationary waves. On this subject he published a paper, for limited readership, giving details of his high potential, wireless electrical broadcasting system which broadcast usable power by transmitting energy in the form of standing waves or stationary waves in the earth’s upper crust and upper ionosphere. This proved that the earth could be used as a huge conductor and Tesla believed that the entire globe could be converted into a huge ‘brain’. The structure was 51 metres high and at its widest 18 metres in diameter, perched on top of the tower was a metallic ball a metre across. Tesla’s aim was to use the earth as a giant electric resonator - the earth itself acting as one pole and the ionosphere as the other. Tesla also believed that there was untapped electrical energy within the earth and his dream was to tap into it. According to the history books the Colorado Springs venture was one of Tesla’s failures with unspectacular results. He succeeded in lighting 200 lamps without wires from a distance of forty kilometres and created artificial lightning forks measuring forty metres. At one time when the huge apparatus was turned on, the following was reported to have occurred ‘thunder split the evening air turning the heads of ranchers 25 kilometres away and local townspeople were sent into panic as a 12 million volt surge knocks out and sets fire to the Colorado power station’. This event is well documented and could well have been the beginning of more sinister experiments based on Tesla technology, some of which may still be continuing today - Death Ray and Star Wars technology. So perhaps Tesla discovered far more than we are led to believe at Colorado Springs but one thing is certain - the earth is a far better conductor of electrical energy than any transmission line.

Page 3

In 1900, at the conclusion of his Colorado experiments, Tesla moved to Long Island and began a short lived head to head battle with Marconi in constructing a wireless world broadcasting system. Funding of $150,000 was supplied by millionaire J. Pierpoint Morgan and the aim was to provide world wide communication and to furnish facilities for sending pictures, messages, weather warnings and stock reports. On the 12th of December 1900 Marconi sent the first transatlantic signal, the letter S, from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. He did this with equipment far less costly than that being built by Tesla. The construction of the Long Island tower, called Wardenclyffe, continued, but went well over budget and when panic and financial trouble set in, Morgan withdrew funding. Rumors abounded at the time - Tesla’s true intention was to broadcast electrical power to the whole planet from single transmission tower. Over the next couple of years the Long Island facility gradually went to ruin. Needless to say Marconi was hailed a world hero and attention from then on was firmly focused on Marconi technology which was far less threatening to the status quo. The Long Island and Colorado ventures were seen by many as massive failures and they did irreparable damage to Tesla’s credibility amongst the scientific community. He was now seen more as an eccentric dreamer than a serious scientist and consequently the substantial funding he had had in the past was no longer available. Sadly most of his ideas from 1905 onwards remained in his notebooks and they are still examined today by scientists in search of clues. There have been some follow ups on Tesla technologies and one study in the early 1960’s was done by Walter Richmond, a research physicist and engineer, and Thomas Bearden an army engineer. The basis of Tesla’s system to tap the earth’s energy was not electromagnetic, but a type of waveform called longitudinal or scalar which his towers propagated through the earth. According to Bearden ( who went on to become a Pentagon Lieutenant - Colonel ), Tesla was using a form of energy which exists ‘behind’ the electromagnetic spectrum and the ‘space time continuum’. This is known as zero point energy of the vacuum or scalar value of zero. He also claimed that an electromagnetic wave is the intersecting of two scalar waves. Tesla did not know that these longitudinal waves only become pronounced at extremely low frequencies ( ELF ), but his discoveries now form the basis of modern ELF technology, including weather and psychotronic ‘modification’. Richmond spent 3 years researching and developing plans to tap into the induced earth current and reached some amazing conclusions, one of which was that there was potentially enough power available to either power the whole world or destroy it ! But when Richmond took his research papers to President John F Kennedy’s science adviser, in 1963, they were immediately classified. Once again it becomes obvious that the answers to some of world’s greatest problems may be in the hands of the ruling elite. Another interesting fact is that Bearden still maintains that the Soviets used Tesla based psychotronic weapons to destroy the US nuclear submarine Thresher in 1963 and that they also deployed a Tesla device to transmit an

Page 4

explosion to an ocean location 1500 kilometres north of Puerto Rico. Tesla suffered an emotional collapse in 1907 but still maintained that his revolutionary power system was the solution to the world’s energy supply for an indefinite period of time. His vision was for a few generating plants located near waterfalls which would power his very high energy transmitters which, in turn, would send power through the earth to be picked up wherever it was needed. Receiving energy from this high pressure reservoir would only require a person to put a rod into the ground and connect it to a receiver operating in resonance with the electrical motion in the earth. Tesla described this in 1911 "The entire apparatus for lighting the average country dwelling will contain no moving parts whatsoever, and could be readily carried about in a small valise." Tesla was also well aware of the weapons capabilities of his research as he stated in 1915 "It is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible...But when unavoidable it may be used to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that the great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe, defined before hand with great accuracy." In 1915 Tesla was bitterly disappointed when a report that he and Edison were to share the Noble Prize proved erroneous but two years later he was partly compensated when he received the Edison Medal, the highest honor that the American Institute of Electrical Engineers bestow. He allowed himself only a few close friends and among them were the famous writers Robert Underwood Johnson, Mark Twain and Francis Marion Crawford. He admired many women especially the very beautiful and intelligent but never found the time for a partner. His mind never rested but it did grow muddled and he spent the final years of his life living at the hotel New Yorker and talking to the pigeons that flocked around him in Manhattan’s parks. Shortly before his death in 1943 he stated "For many years my life was little short of a continuous rapture. I have thrived on my thoughts." He died on January 7,1943, the holder of fourteen doctorates from universities all over the world, penniless and alone. So is Tesla a forgotten genius two generations before his time or a scientist who was eaten up by his eccentricity and obsessions? There is certainly no doubting the man’s genius but my limited research has revealed an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the more ‘fringe’ elements of his theories, albeit circumstantial. The social revolutions that would follow the verification of such theories are enormous and carefully developed they could certainly change the world as we know it. The weather could be modified so deserts would flower and arctic wastes become fertile aswell as cleaning up pollutants from the biosphere and repairing the ozone layer. Perhaps the powers that be know all too well the potential of Tesla technology and they may well have spent the last eighty years perfecting it. I certainly believe that the true extent of Tesla’s genius is yet to be revealed and that he was a hundred years before his time. One man’s floor is another man’s ceiling.

Page 5

Reference List

1. http://www.discovery.com/inventors/inventors.html 2. http://www neuronet.pitt.edu/tesla/onedison.html 3. Cheney, Margaret, Tesla, Man out of Time, Dell Publishing, USA, 1983, p. 214. 4. Secor, H. Winfield, "The Tesla High Frequency Oscillator", The Electrical Experimenter, March 1916, p. 615. 5. Nichelson, Oliver, "Tesla’s Transmitter", Nexus New Times, Vol 2, No 27, 1995, p. 40. 6. Bearden, Thomas, "Soviet Psychotronic Weapons", Earth Energy, July 1976, p.98. 7. American Examiner, 1911 (issue number unknown) 8. Tesla, Nikola, "Tesla’s new device like bolts of Thor", The New York Times, 8th December 1915, p. 8. 9. Tesla, Nikola, "Telsa genius lives on", The New York Times, 23rd October 1942, p. 15.